DJ Jace Clayton

It's not typical for a self-produced mix CD to get a four-star review in Vibe. But that's what happened last spring when DJ/rupture's Gold Teeth Thief got raves from reviewers enamored of the way expatriate American DJ Jace Clayton mashed up the likes of Bounty Killer and Luciano Berio, Nas and DJ Scud, Muslimgauze and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. In contrast to someone like his friend kid606, whose kid606 the action packed mentallist brings you the fucking jams collection of freaky bootlegs runs roughshod over the hits, demolishing them with hyperactive glee, Clayton's remix style is more subtle, or as he might put it, sly. A tweak here, a tweak there, a little of his own more-abstract electronica in the mix and songs sound recognizably themselves, but transformed. Unlikely juxtapositions illuminate unexpected commonalities. Gold Teeth Thief's intellectual quotient was always kept under control or, better, properly linked to the musical?Clayton says of his DJ work that he likes "to keep people moving even as I'm getting into perhaps more and more stranger and more and more abrasive stuff...that's when it works. If not it's just blank faces and people scratching their heads."

Minesweeper Suite (Tigerbeat6) is Clayton's followup to Gold Teeth Thief. In many ways it's a similar shotgun of dancehall, Middle Eastern music, techno and dub, frequently moving at Autobahn-like speeds and sweeping up everyone from Foxy Brown to Eiterherd in its path. But the overall feel is a bit more meditative, looser and less balls-out than Thief. The disc starts out with voices raised in Arabic song; their melody has a wide-open emotional feel similar to the Miriam Makeba fragment that finished off the earlier disc. Soon J-Boogie creeps in underneath, and we're back in the information age, with Nina Simone, Mutamassik and Aaliyah rubbing up against one another, generating sparks. Underneath and throughout and in between is Clayton's own work, solo as DJ/rupture or in partnership with Spanish painter DD, together known as Nettle. Clayton's stuff is some of the strongest material on the disc?holding its own with the more recognizable names?and Nettle has a new full-length CD out as well, called Build a Fort, Set That on Fire (theAgriculture).

Clayton says many of the structures on the Nettle album are based on taqsim, or improvisational patterns from the heavily Arab-influenced music of Andalusia, in southern Spain. This Arabic "flavor" punctuates the album, popping up in hand drum and string samples, but the actual sounds a listener hears on the disc are heavily reworked sources that, unlike the DJ/rupture material, aren't readily recognizable, or danceable. Clanking, crashes, gurgles, thuds and hypnotic distorted vocal fragments spiral out to enfold the listener in an atmosphere that's often ominous, at times apocalyptic and war-like?a quiet, ongoing war?and is certainly more intrusive and demanding than the label "ambient" suggests. "Illbient" is, in fact, a pretty good description. It's music that makes sense coming from Clayton, who says he was "laid flat" by Japanese noise acts like Gerogerigegege and the Incapacitants at age 15, and whose early sonic experiments involved purposely crashing the primitive sound card on his family's computer. Build A Fort's song titles, like "Defragmentation" and "The End of Public Space," suggest not just intellectual preoccupations but sonic methods and allusions.

Unlike the ear-corroding assault of Japanoise Inc., Nettle is, again, more subtle. The music's rhythms and motifs insinuate themselves and invite repeated listening. Like Clayton's solo work as DJ/rupture, Nettle's surface is sleek and inviting partially because of its rigorous, perfectionistic construction. Clayton likes to play with sound. He's not afraid of but rather drawn to aggressive sounds, be they thumping electronic bombardment or Barrington Levy ("I'm broad?I'm broad?I'm broader than Broadway"), but he talks about producing music with computers as an "intimate" process, and that intimacy shows. He's working with the sounds he chooses rather than bending them to his will.

With the war-like ambience of Build a Fort and the overall influence of Arabic music on Clayton's joints, it's not too much of a stretch to read some politics in the music. Clayton's comments in other media and his sampling of Makeba and Dead Prez indicate he leans left. Certainly there's a kind of prescience about his music?Nettle's first EP, released in February 2001, was called Bin Scrape Laden?but Clayton wants the music to remain music, not political speech.

"My whole thing with being political in music, well...there's a fine line between protest songs, which just tend to turn into propaganda, and doing something more?sly. That's what I'm interested in. There are these moments in the music, links, that are intended to make people think, or question, or just go 'well'?it's almost like a pre-political thing. Often when people say political music it just sounds instantly boring"?he laughs?"I mean I don't want to hear it."

Perhaps the clear "political" point evident in Clayton's music, about a kind of interconnectedness exemplified by last year's terror attacks, is parallel to a musical-sociological one, about a partial leveling of genre distinctions and fame factors made possible by new electronic techniques of production and distribution. Good music is everywhere, as it always was, only now comparatively little of it remains local.

"These days, you can turn on commercial hiphop radio and hear crazy beats, crazy music. And often I go into a random record shop in Switzerland [Clayton currently lives in Spain] and find some bizarre brilliant record from a French producer that only 500 copies exist."

The story of Gold Teeth Thief exemplifies how music works, or at any rate can work, these days. Clayton put the mix together in a few days about a year and a half ago while stuck in Boston awaiting his visa back to Spain. Only about 500 copies existed originally, with some placed at Other Music and Kim's by his friends, and it was available as a free download from Clayton's label, Soot (and still is, at www.negrophonic.com). Once the mix blew up Clayton was invited to do some remixes: Aaliyah's "We Need a Resolution" and a Sade/Soul II Soul track. Now New Zealand label Violent Turd has reissued Thief, a cassette version was circulated in France and Clayton estimates a couple of thousand people have downloaded it from the site.

Minesweeper Suite, on kid606's label, should draw a similarly sized audience. As for Build a Fort, Set That on Fire?well, Clayton says he doesn't care whether something has a pop sheen or an underground rust, and his continuing to pursue Nettle alongside his more crowd-friendly solo projects seems to show he means it.